Experienced Technology Leader Named as ICANN President and CEO

Göran Marby, currently Director-General of the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS) to start at ICANN May 2016

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Los Angeles, California… Göran Marby, an experienced business executive and government leader has been named the next President and Chief Executive Officer of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

"I'm delighted to announce Göran as the new head of ICANN," said Dr. Stephen Crocker, Chair of the ICANN Board of Directors. "His leadership experience as a technology CEO and start-up founder as well as his current experience as Director-General of the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority will be invaluable as ICANN moves towards the next chapter in its history. We conducted an extensive, global search and Göran impressed us all throughout with his shared values, operational experience and understanding of the Internet ecosystem. I'm looking forward to working with him and what I know will be his substantial contribution to ICANN and to helping ensure a stable, secure and unified global Internet."

Marby is a Swedish citizen, currently living in Stockholm. He and his family will be relocating to Los Angeles, California the location of one of ICANN's three global hubs.

"I am very excited to be joining ICANN and joining at the start of a new era for the organization and the community," said Marby. "While I know there is much for me to learn, I am eager to work with ICANN's multistakeholder community to continue all the good work that ICANN has been doing and am very committed to implementing the community's decisions – both with respect to the IANA Stewardship Transition, but also in the myriad important areas of ICANN policy development as it fulfills its mission."

Marby will succeed current President and CEO Fadi Chehadé whose term finishes on March 15, 2016. Marby will join ICANN in May 2016. During this time, Akram Atallah, President of ICANN's Global Domains Division will serve as acting CEO.

"I am very grateful to Akram for agreeing to step into this role and providing the continuity and leadership ICANN needs at such an important time," said Dr Crocker.

Göran Marby has more than 20 years of experience in the Internet and technology sectors. Prior to joining PTS he co-founded AppGate Network Security AB a security software company where he served as CEO between 2002 and 2009 with a focus on international customers and operations.

He has held several other leadership roles in the Internet and technology sectors including as CEO of Cygate a network services company, Country Manager for Cisco in Sweden and as CEO of Unisource Business Networks in Sweden.

Marby holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Gothenburg School Economics.

About ICANN

ICANN's mission is to ensure a stable, secure and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet you have to type an address into your computer - a name or a number. That address has to be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN coordinates these unique identifiers across the world. Without that coordination we wouldn't have one global Internet. ICANN was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet's unique identifiers. ICANN doesn't control content on the Internet. It cannot stop spam and it doesn't deal with access to the Internet. But through its coordination role of the Internet's naming system, it does have an important impact on the expansion and evolution of the Internet. For more information please visit: www.icann.org.

ICANN is not responsible for profile content or verification of user details.

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Domain Name System

Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."